CrowdCL: Web-based volunteer computing with WebCL

We present CrowdCL, an open-source framework for the rapid development of volunteer computing and OpenCL applications on the web. Drawing inspiration from existing GPU libraries like PyCUDA, CrowdCL provides an abstraction layer for WebCL aimed at reducing boilerplate and improving code readability. CrowdCL also provides developers with a framework to easily run computations in the background of a web page, which allows developers to distribute computations across a network of clients and aggregate results on a centralized server. We compare the performance of CrowdCL against serial implementations in Javascript and Java across a variety of platforms. Our benchmark results show strong promise for the web browser as a high-performance distributed computing platform.